WAITING FOR ALLAHsanipanhwar.com/Waiting for Allah Christina Lamb.pdfHamid Karzay, Hamid and Ishaq Gailani and Asim Nasser-Zia were particular friends, as was Commander Abdul Haq,

WAITING FOR ALLAH

PAKISTAN’S STRUGGLE FORDEMOCRACY

CHRISTINA LAMB

Reproduced By

Sani H. PanhwarMember Sindh Council, PPP

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .. .. .. .. .. .. 1

MAPS .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 2

CHRONOLOGY .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 4

INTRODUCTION .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7

1. INVENTING A COUNTRY .. .. .. .. .. 18

2. GANGSTERS IN BANGLES’ COME TO ISLAMABAD .. 33Benazir Bhutto’s inheritance

3. TICKETS TO THE MASKED BALL .. .. .. .. 44Democracy — Pakistan style

4. THE SUPERPATRONAGE ROADSHOW .. .. .. 56Feudal politics

5. A SUBCONTINENTAL DYNASTY .. .. .. .. 69The White Queen and the Evil Dictator

6. ‘BUT MINISTER ...’ .. .. .. .. .. .. 85Who rules Pakistan?

7. SINDH - LAND OF ROBIN HOODS AND WARRIOR SAINTS 103

8. DIAL-A-KALASIINIKOV .. .. .. .. .. 120Of ethnic violence and identity problems in Karachi and Hyderabad

9. PROPHETS AND LOSSES .. .. .. .. .. 144The immoral economy

10. THE GREAT GAME REVISITED .. .. .. .. .. 163Of blood feuds and tribal wars

11. ‘RESISTANCE TOURS LTD’ .. .. .. .. .. 179Afghanistan — the war on the borders

12. SQUANDERING VICTORY .. .. .. .. .. 199Fighting to the last Afghan for a dead man’s dream

13. IN THE NAME OF THE CRESCENT .. .. .. .. 223India — the dragon on the doorstep

14. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK .. .. .. .. .. 238

GLOSSARY .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 256

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY .. .. .. .. .. .. 258

An Elusive Dawn

This trembling light, this nightbitten dawnThis is not the Dawn we waited for so longThis is not the Dawn whose birth was siredBy so many lives, so much blood

Generations ago we started our confident march,Our hopes were young, our goal within reach

After all there must be some limitTo the confusing constellation of starsIn the vast forest of the skyEven the lazy languid wavesMust reach at last their appointed shore

And so we wistfully prayedFor a consummate end to our painful search.

FAIZ AHMED FAIZ

Waiting for Allah; Copyright © www.bhutto.org 1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Throughout the length and breadth of Pakistan there are many people for whosehelp I am grateful and because of whom I have an enduring affection for thecountry — so many that it is not possible to mention them all.

The Arbab family, Naseem and Sehyr Saigol, Kamal Azfar, Arif Nizami, the lateBrigadier Salik, Najam Sethi and Nusrat Javed were all of particular help.

Not least among those to whom I owe thanks are the many Afghan mujaheddinwith whom I travelled into war zones and late into the night discussed theregion’s past and future.

Hamid Karzay, Hamid and Ishaq Gailani and Asim Nasser-Zia were particularfriends, as was Commander Abdul Haq, with whom I shared a fondness for ice-cream.

Sir Nicholas Barrington, the British High Commissioner in Islamabad, alsodeserves a special mention for his help in trying to stop the Interior Ministrydeporting me.

Thanks are owed to my colleagues at the Financial Times for their support, inparticular to Robin Pauley and Jurek Martin for encouraging me to give up aperfectly decent job at Central TV to go out and live in Pakistan.

Professor Akbar Ahmed at Cambridge University has been an invaluable friendand sounding board.

My editor, Jon Riley, has patiently guided me through my first book.

Above all, thanks to my parents for putting up with a daughter frequently lost inthe wilds and my endless battles with the word processor.


CHRONOLOGY OF PAKISTAN

1947: Independence from British Rule and formation of Pakistan from Muslimmajority provinces of India. War with India over Kashmir, the onlyMuslim majority province to stay in India.

1948: Death of Jinnah, founder of Pakistan and first head of state. Liaquat AliKhan takes over as first Prime Minister.

1951: Liaquat assassinated in mysterious circumstances. Civil servants becomedominant force.

1952: First ethnic riots in the majority province of East Pakistan, at attempts toimpose Urdu as the national language and lack of representation forBengalis in central administration.

1953: First religious riots against minority Ahmadi sect. First martial lawimposed in Lahore.

1954: Pakistan joins SEATO, a US-sponsored military alliance, and US becomesprincipal military supplier.

1955: Provinces of West Pakistan merged into ‘One Unit’, causing resentmentamong smaller provinces.

1956: First Constitution framed.

1958: First military coup under command of General Ayub Khan. Parliamentdissolved and martial law imposed.

1962: Second Constitution introduced to install a centralized presidential systemunderwritten by the military.

1964: Ayub ‘defeats’ Fatima Jinnah, sister of the country’s founder, inPresidential election.

1965: Second war with India over Kashmir. Defeat weakens Ayub’s position.

1966: Awami League, main party of East Pakistan, proposes a confederation ofthe two regions.


1969: Ayub hands over to General Yahya Khan after period of unrest.

1970: Pakistan’s first free elections. Awami League sweeps East Pakistan and Z.A. Bhutto’s People’s Party wins majority in West Pakistan.

1971: Army refuses to transfer power to Awami League and sends in troops toEast Pakistan. India goes to aid of Bengalis who secede from Pakistan toform Bangladesh. Z. A. Bhutto takes over as Martial Law Administrator ofremaining Pakistan.

1972: Bhutto, now Prime Minister, devalues rupee by 131 percent and beginsnationalization campaign.

1973: Third Constitution introduced, but this time with the support of allpolitical parties. Baluchistan government dismissed and N W FPgovernment resigns in protest. Army sent into Baluchistan to deal withinsurrection.

1977: PPP government rigs country’s second parliamentary elections. Armycalled out to deal with resulting protest movement and martial lawdeclared in cities.General Zia ul-Haq takes over in coup, promising elections within ninetydays.Bhutto charged with murder.

1978: Islamicization process begun in attempt to legitimize military rule.

1979: Bhutto executed. Political activity banned.Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

1980: Afghan refugees begin pouring into Pakistan.US ends Pakistan’s international isolation by declaring support.

1983: Army sent into Sindh to suppress revolt against military rule.

1984: Benazir Bhutto leaves Pakistan for London.Zia declares himself ‘elected’ President after referendum on Islamicization.

1985: Zia announces Mohammad Khan Junejo Prime Minister of Assemblyelected on non-party basis to form civilian buffer for military rule.


1986: Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan to largest ever crowds for a politicalleader.

1987: Bhutto marries Asif Zardari, a Sindhi feudal.

1988: Soviet troops begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.Zia dismisses his own handpicked government, dissolves assemblies andannounces elections. Ten weeks later he is killed along with entire topbrass of the army and US ambassador in a mysterious plane crash. PPPemerges as the largest party in elections but not with a majority. Afterlong delay, Bhutto is allowed to form government.

1989: Soviet troops complete withdrawal from Afghanistan but Pakistan-backedresistance fails to topple communist regime in Kabul.

1990: India and Pakistan on verge of fourth war after unrest breaks out inKashmir.Troops once more sent into cities of Sindh to sort out ethnic violence.Bhutto government dismissed.Nawaz Sharif, army-backed former protégé of General Zia, wins electionto become Prime Minister. PPP trounced.


INTRODUCTION

INVITATION TO THE TAMASHA

‘Benazir Benazir Wazir-e-Azam1 Benazir!’ Thousands upon thousands of underfedbodies crushed together in Lyari stadium in one of the poorest slums of Karachi,hanging from skeletal trees, crowded on overlooking balconies, screamingfrenziedly for the young woman they believed would lift them out of theirmiserable poverty.

Above the excited din, flabby and sweat-stained members of the PakistanPeople’s Party jostled for the microphone to compete with the static inobsequious songs eulogizing their leader. As Benazir Bhutto’s Japanese jeeppressed its way through crowded narrow bazaar streets-to reach the feverishaudience, fireworks exploded into the night sky, reflected in thousands ofburning eyes. It was impossible not to share in the excitement, as the mostdormant of Western senses were dizzied and assailed by the thumpingdiscordant music and heady Eastern aroma of sweat, jasmine and rose-petals,curling, hashish smoke and sizzling samosas.

It was the tamasha to end all tamashas. But Big Brother, in the form of Pakistan’smilitary, was as always not far away. Among the pulsing throng slippedintelligence agents, sending back reports to the, sterile capital of Islamabad onebe fingered impatiently by the slyly grinning general who was One of theworld’s longest-ruling dictators.

Billed the ‘People’s Wedding’, the public ceremony of the marriage of BenazirBhutto with Asif Zardari was a barely disguised political rally. For me, a youngEnglish journalist on my first foreign assignment, the spectacle wassimultaneously fascinating and repelling — what could these most marginalizedof people really expect from the white-skinned feudal princess, arriving glitter-dad and attendant-surrounded on her rose-strewn stage? Yet they danced thatnight in the fever of hope. In contrast, barely disguising his boredom, loungingnext to Benazir in starched white on a red velvet throne, was Asif, the chain-smoking playboy who would ultimately help bring her down and himself endup behind bars.

1 Wazir-e-Azam: Prime Minister


Her every move under scrutiny by General Zia’s thousand eyes, as it had beenfor eleven years since her father was removed from the premiership andsubsequently hanged, Benazir’s courage and stamina were impressive. Thewedding scene was a striking contrast to the silk-lined Kensington flat where Ihad interviewed her for the first time four months earlier. But even then,outlining her political plans as she sat surrounded by extravagant bouquetscongratulating her on her engagement, Benazir Bhutto was clearly a woman witha destiny.

On that sultry wedding night in December 1987 in downtown Karachi, it wasnobody’s guess that within one year Benazir would be Prime Minister. Norwould the struggle end there. In less than two more years, similar crowds wouldsurround the colonnades of the nearby Karachi court where she stood tearfullyaccused of corruption, removed from power by the same generals who hadreluctantly let her in. The story of her rise and fall was without doubt one of thebest political sagas of the 1980s.

The morning the gold-embossed wedding invitation dropped through myletterbox in Birmingham was one of industrial shade! of autumn grey. Bycontrast, the spidery gold Urdu script promised an exotic adventure far from mynormal routine as trainee reporter at Central TV, one of Britain’s largest regionatelevision stations.

I was not to be disappointed. From the moment the plant stopped in Dubai, to beboarded by pyjama-clad Pakistani Gulf workers swathed in clumsy cloth andclutching high-tech ghetto-blasters, I was intrigued. So utterly illiterate were theproud-faced tribesmen that not one could decipher his seat number, stumblingclumsily while a sniffy-nosed air hostess and the Western-suited businessmannext to me looked on in disgust. In the twenty months I was ultimately to spendin Pakistan, I never lost the initial sensation of how, instead of passing from oneepoch to another, the centuries somehow co-existed there.

The scene on the plane and the sweaty clamor of Karachi airport, where I wastugged this way and that by insistent porters, fingered by beggars andharangued by taxi-drivers, one of whom ferried me helter-skelter through thenoisy traffic, was another world again from that of the elegant silk-clad ladiesswishing through the cool rooms of the Bhutto house in the week-long weddingcelebrations.

Followed up the road from the house by an unsubtle intelligence agent in cravatand dark glasses, I came across a group of scruffy hawkers beneath a green andwhite painted shrine, selling fragrant rose and jasmine garlands to the constantflow of people climbing its long flight of steps in search of health and prosperity.


Taking photos, I was pursued by a man with a dancing monkey to a roadsidestall where a scrawny faded green parrot told fortunes by picking out cards. Anill-tempered creature with one eye produced a card predicting that I would beback within a year. It was a safe bet. I was intrigued by the enigma of Pakistan,with its tragic history.

Back in the dreary British Midlands, I longed for the colours and sounds andrealized that reporting on car crashes and knitting exhibitions would never bequite the same again. When the trusting Asia editor of the Financial Times gaveme the opportunity to return a few months later, I set off with an oversizedsuitcase packed with all my worldly goods, arriving in the chaos that was thefrontier town of Peshawar in the run-up to the withdrawal of Soviet troops fromneighbouring Afghanistan.

Eleven years into military rule, the country was in a mess: Benazir seemed theonly hope. A twentieth-century Western educated woman as leader of a countryrooted in Islam and Eastern precepts, run on a feudal social code belonging tothe Middle Ages was that really the answer?

With the benefit of foresight, perhaps the country’s founder, Mohammad AliJinnah, would never have pushed so hard for Pakistan. Only a year after securingits creation in 1947 he was dead, no longer able to fight off the tuberculosis thathad been devouring his lungs. Looking at faded photographs showing Jinnahwith Mountbatten, the British Viceroy, and Indian Congress members in the run-up to Partition, it seems incredible that they did not guess the deadly secretbehind the stretched, ghostly face.

Without Jinnah’s guiding ambition, it became tragically clear that religion wasnot enough to hold together a country with two wings 1,500 miles apart and nocommon language. As the cracks began surfacing, traumatic events followed inquick succession The first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was gunned downOctober 1951, an assassination carried out, some suspected, by the clergy whoresented his secular stance. Language riots broke out among the Bengalis of EastPakistan, who, denied a fair share of jobs in the army and civil service — the twoorganizations which were already becoming the country’s masters — felt thatthey had simply exchanged one set of oppressors for another. Pakistan’s firstmartial law was declared the following year in Lahore, when mullahs took to thestreets demanding the outlawing of the Ahmadi sect in an attempt to purgeIslam and make Pakistan the ‘land the pure’ to which its name translates.

Within four years of Pakistan’s creation the country had be robbed of its twopreeminent leaders, and the Muslim League the party which had fought forPakistan, was disintegrating. Unlike the Indian Congress Party, which had its


links in all regions, the strongest roots of the Muslim League had been in UttarPradesh, which had remained in India. The party’s decline left way open for thecivil service to run things, and in what amounted to a civil coup, a seniorbureaucrat, Ghulam Mohammad, became Governor General of Pakistan.

While India was holding its first election in 1952, Pakistan was still arguing overa Constitution. There were two main obstacles. The country had been created atcross-purposes: secularists Jinnah and Liaquat had wanted it to safeguardMuslim political and economic interests, while the clergy saw it as a new cradleof Islam, purged of modern influences. Consequently from the start they had nohope of agreeing on the role Islam should play in running of the state. Theunresolved debate over this, in particular the question of whether democracyand Islam can be compatible, was fundamental in Pakistan’s failure to shake ofits military shackles. But in those early years there was another, more tangible,obstacle. In a democratic system the East Pakistanis who made up 54 percent ofthe population would hold sway, a situation their oppressors in West Pakistancould not abide. It took a bloody war to resolve the issue finally, with a furtherpartition in 1971 to form Bangladesh.

The first Constitution was finally introduced in 1956, formally naming Pakistanan Islamic nation, which only a Muslim could read. But two years and threeprime ministers later it was scrapped, long with all pretence of democracy. In1958 Generals Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan declared martial law, stating thatthe Constitution was unworkable. A long cycle of military rule had begun.

Today the late Field-Marshal Ayub is looked back on as something of a hero, as adictator who really did make the trains run on time, even if he awarded himselfmany medals and titles for his accomplishments. In the search for legitimacywhich preoccupies so many military rulers, he introduced a scheme called ‘BasicDemocracy’ under which the country was divided into 80,000 constituencies,each of about 1,000 people, who voted from a preselected list for a representativeknown as a ‘Basic Democrat’. Basic it was, and crude too. In February 1960 the80,000 Basic Democrats, who were rather easier to manipulate than an entireelectorate, mostly answered yes to the question, ‘Do you have confidence inPresident Ayub?’ allowing him to declare himself elected’ by a 95.6 percent vote.

Two years later Ayub introduced a Constitution which did not cognize politicalparties, concentrating power in the hand of the President. It also institutionalizedthe power of the military and Bureaucracy, as the latter selected candidates forBasic Democrats, who then chose members of the national and provincialassemblies. Article 131 was the icing on the cake, sanctioning whatever action thePresident might care to take that was in the ‘national interest’. Suchcentralization of power and reliance on the Punjabi-dominated bureaucracy


seriously inflamed Bengali alienation, particularly as Ayub was openly racistabout what he called the inferior breed’.

But Ayub’s green revolution and pro-business policies brought an economicboom to Pakistan. Between 1958 and 1963, industrial production grew by 72percent — well above the Asian average of 55 percent. The second half of thedecade saw an annual average agricultural growth of 6.3 percent. But thebenefits were concentrated among the elite, and mostly in Punjab. While the richwere getting richer the poor had got poorer, and the social sector received scantattention, beginning the illiteracy spiral. Education received less than 1 percent ofGNP. Dr Mehbub-ul Haq, the Planning Minister, argued that a widening ofincome inequality was necessary in the initial stages of development, in order toprovide a larger cake which eventually everyone would get more of.

But as the cake increased in size it became available to fewer consumers, anddisclosures such as the fact that twenty-two families owned 66 percent of thecountry’s industry, 97 percent of insurance and 80 percent of banking could onlygenerate unrest. Despite the consistent rise in per capita national income, theliving standards of many actually fell. Between 1954 and 1967 wages industrialworkers in West Pakistan fell by 12 percent, while the gap between per capitaincome in East and West Pakistan grew from 30 percent to 61 percent.

Failure to tackle both regional and economic distributive discrepancies could notcontinue ignored. While Ayub was celebrating his ‘Decade of Development’ thepeople of both East and West Pakistan were stirring. His authority over the armyhad be weakened by Pakistan’s defeat in the 1965 war against India overKashmir, and he never lifted the state of emergency then impose In factfundamental rights remained suspended in Pakistan until March 1985.Resentment had reached a crescendo in East Pakistan where Sheikh Mujib’sAwami League led strikes and protests against West Pakistan, which, like theBritish colonizers, was buying Bengali jute cheaply, processing it and taking theprofits from exporting it.

In West Pakistan the opportunity was seized by Zulfikar Bhutto, who had been aprotégé of Ayub and his Foreign Minister till he was sacked in 1967. Bhutto setup the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), using socialist rhetoric and personalcharisma to support among workers and peasants for a grand anti-Ayubmovement. Ill and facing mounting pressure, on 21 February 1969 Ayub handedover power to another general, Yahya Khan, who rather surprisingly kept hispromise to hold elections.

Calling for ‘roti, kapra our makan’ (‘bread, clothing and shelter’), Ali Bhuttoremains the only politician in Pakistan to have fought an election on economic


slogans. He became its first elected Prime Minister, but his victory was marred.While Bhutto won 81 out of 138 seats in West Pakistan, the real winner of the1970 election was Mujib, who swept the East, taking all but two of the 162 seats,giving him a countrywide majority. It was the logical outcome of the 1947Partition, but for the Punjabi-dominated military and civil service the prospect ofBengali rule was the worst possible scenario and one they refused to accept.

Already betraying his supposed commitment to democracy, Bhutto told his partymembers he would ‘break their legs’ if they attended the Parliament, forcingYahya to reject Mujib’s compromise suggestion of a confederation with twosovereign states, two Constitutions and common defence, foreign policy andcurrency. The Awami League began a wave of protests across East Pakistan,bringing the capital, Dacca, to a standstill. Mujib was arrested and flown to WestPakistan and the army moved in, beginning a catalogue of atrocities against the‘bingos’ as they referred to their darker-skinned, smaller Bengali countrymen.

The inevitable happened. On 23 November 1971 India invaded and the battlewas soon over. While Pakistan Television was talking of glory and Bhutto wastearing up a ceasefire resolution in the UN in New York, shouting that Pakistanwould fight for ‘a thousand years’, Dacca fell most ungloriously. Bangladesh wasdeclared an independent country and Bhutto was sworn in as Chief Martial LawAdministrator and President of what remained of Pakistan.

Despite, or perhaps even because of, the humiliating defeat, Bhutto started officein a strong position. Though the army was by no means united over the idea of acivilian government, junior officers were no longer prepared to take instructionsfrom seniors who had surrendered up more than half the country.

The first two years under Bhutto were the closest Pakistan has ever come todemocracy, culminating in the all-party signing of the country’s thirdConstitution — the first to guarantee universal suffrage through direct elections.But even in that time periodicals were banned and editors arrested, and theimpressive array of rights guaranteed by the new Constitution remainedsuspended throughout Bhutto’s rule. Many now believe Bhutto had seized ondemocratic slogans only when, after falling out with Ayub, he realized that thiswas his only route to power, as the army would never support him for the topjob.

On 14 February 1973, in a most undemocratic manner, he sacked the left-winggovernment of Baluchistan, accusing it of planning secession. There seems littleevidence that it was doing anything more seditious than trying to improve theappalling lot of Pakistan’s largest and least populous province, but Bhutto wasparanoid about a repetition of Bangladesh. The ill-thought-out move sparked off


an insurgency in which 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed. Bhuttowas already making the mistake of using the army to clear up a civiliangovernment’s mess, and within a year the military was back in power in oneprovince.

Obsessed by staying in power at all costs, Bhutto discarded his socialistcolleagues, fearing that they were creating their own lobbies, and set up aparamilitary organization called the Federal Security Force to persecute theenemies he began to sec every-where. Forgetting his slogans, Bhutto turned toPakistan’s traditional power-brokers for support, recruiting rich zamindars. Toolate he tried to win over the business community, but they had been alienated byhis ruthless nationalization campaign and the devaluation of the rupee by 131percent, which had put an end to Pakistan’s boom. To woo the mullahs and theIslamic world he banned alcohol and outlawed minority Muslim sects such asthe Ahmadis. But the clergy would not forget how he had ridiculed them in hisearly days, when he defended his penchant for whisky by arguing that themullahs drank blood.

However, the ordinary people had no one else to turn to and Bhutto could stillwork his magic before a crowd. Yet so paranoid was he that though he wouldhave won the 1977 elections anyway, Bhutto felt compelled to rig the vote tosecure 80 percent of the seats. This was the final straw which convinced manythat he wanted civilian dictatorship. The opposition parties, which ranged fromreligious groups to former PPP members, all ganged up in a grand anti-PPPmovement known as the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), backed by moneyfrom businessmen and Saudi Arabia. Betrayed by Bhutto’s repression and failureto introduce progressive government, people took to the streets all over Pakistan.

Panicking, Bhutto declared martial law in the cities of Lahore, Karachi andHyderabad and ordered troops to fire on PNA supporters coming out ofmosques. As all Pakistan’s leaders have discovered in turn, using the army as agovernment police force is to invite disaster, and the army began refusing to fire.There was general relief when on 4 July 1977, in an operation code-named‘Fairplay’, the army surrounded the houses of all PPP leaders and put Bhuttounder house arrest in the hill resort of Murree.

Declaring himself interested only in being a good soldier, General Zia, the armychief who had headed the coup, promised elections within ninety days. It wasthe first of many such promises to be broken. When Bhutto was freed, hisrenewed ability to draw huge crowds made his victory seem assured. Inevitablythe elections were cancelled, and Bhutto was locked up with a murder chargeissued against him.


It soon became clear that the general whom Bhutto had made army chief becausehe thought him too unintelligent to present a threat was a master strategist.Loathing politicians, Zia relied on civil servants and a few zamindars. But his bigmistake was to hang Bhutto, convinced that while alive he would present athreat even behind bars. What he failed to appreciate was that by executingBhutto on an apparently trumped-up murder charge he would make him amartyr, clearing his name to make his ghost and ultimately his heir a far greaterthreat.

Condemned internationally for the hanging, Zia launched a stern Islamicizationprogramme to make Pakistan a theocracy, in the start of a painful search forlegitimacy for his regime. Thousands of people were arrested in the process, butluck was on his side. The Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan on 26December 1979 suddenly made Pakistan a crucial American ally and conduit forsupport to the Afghan resistance. Overnight the stocky general with thecomically pomaded hair became a heroic defender of the frontier of the freeworld. Western aid soon began pumping in. But along with the money came aninflux of weaponry and drugs to add to Pakistan’s already myriad socialproblems.

And there was another force Zia had not reckoned with. On the eve of Bhutto’sexecution his daughter Benazir, the young convent-educated girl who wanted toenter the foreign service, had promised her father that she would carry on hismission. Her only training on the floor of the very civilized Oxford DebatingUnion, the nervous twenty-six-year-old began touring the country, clutching herfather’s Mao cap and catching the country’s imagination. In a subcontinentwhich thrives on political dynasties, Benazir was the obvious heir to her father’spolitical mantle, despite the oppressed position of women in Pakistani societywhich meant that even at the public ceremony of her own wedding the sexeswere segregated.

Zia countered with a series of prison spells and house arrests for Benazir and hermother Nusrat, co-leaders of the PPP. Finally in 1984 Benazir was driven by ill-health to London, where she remained in exile in the Barbican for two years.There she began showing that as well as inheriting some of her father’s powerfulcharisma and the all-important Bhutto name, she had been dealt a fair share ofhis famous arrogance. Angered by Benazir’s refusal to allow elections, within theparty, some of in founding members left in disgust, including Ghulam MustafaJatoi, who had led a movement of civil unrest in 1983 to push for elections andhad twice refused offers from Zia to become Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, in 1985, under both national and American pressure, Zia began acivilian experiment based on non-party elections. Despite a PPP call for boycott,


53 percent voted — more than in the two subsequent party-based elections —and Zia installed the unknown mango farmer Mohammad Khan Junejo as hishand-picked Prime Minister.

But Zia could not destroy the PPP, and Benazir was to dog him to the end. On 10April 1986, apparently assured of American support, she made a triumphantreturn to Pakistan, inspired by watching the scenes on television of CoryAquino’s successful movement against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.More than a million people came out into the streets of Lahore to shower Benazirwith rose-petals, as she was driven under the shadow of the city’s massive fortalong the Mall, past the building in which the young Rudyard Kipling oncehammered out copy for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, drawing bizarrecomparisons between Pakistan’s city of Arabian nights, and the Sussex Downswhere he had spent his youth.

For that first month Benazir drew record audiences at meetings from the Khyberto Karachi, even in areas like the Baluchi capital of Quetta, which was usuallyhostile to the PPP. The large crowds drawn perhaps as much by curiosity andboredom as by genuine support led Benazir to overestimate the party’s strength.After party leaders were arrested in a crackdown in August, the ‘peaceful’ anti-government campaign for elections soon fizzled out, along with her hopes ofsimulating Cory’s Peoplepower.

When Benazir’s wedding took place in December of the following year, fewamong even her most ardent supporters believed that within a year she would bePrime Minister. It was with obviously fake bravado that on the first day of theweek-long celebrations Benazir’s friends sang to her future husband, ‘You mustagree that Benazir will serve the nation,’ to which he replied, ‘That’s all right, Iwill look after the children.’

When I returned to Pakistan in April 1988 international interest was only inAfghanistan. In fact, I was with a mujaheddin group dodging Soviet bombs acrossthe border when on 29 May to nation-wide shock, Zia abruptly dismissed hisown government and dissolved the assemblies, again promising elections withinninety days that few believed he would hold.

Starting to feel the pressure from Pakistan’s US backers, who wereuncomfortable at continuing to support a dictator, Zia had begun makingmistakes. Public outcry at the explosion of the Ojheri camp missile dump inRawalpindi, killing hundreds, had brought the reputation of the army to an all-time low. When the government joined in the criticism it was dismissed. Zia hadobviously never intended actually to share power.


With the country confused and fearing Zia’s next move and the US angry at thetermination of even a pretence of democracy, the general’s sudden death in amysterious plane crash in August was nothing if not convenient. For Benazirfinally the field was open.

This book follows the intrigues to stop Benazir getting into power, and toundermine her even after she had assumed office. With spies from all majorpowers at work in the country and Pakistan’s massive military intelligencemachine running its own state within a state, the situation was frequently surreal.My own personal experiences ranged from the bizarre, such as finding a lime-green dyed sheep tied up in my garden with a compliments note attachedexplaining it was to be sacrificed at a time deemed appropriate by the moon-sighting committee (part of the yearly celebrations for the Muslim festival of Eid),to the frightening, such as being taken in and interrogated by intelligenceofficials, accused of acting as a liaison between British and Soviet espionage in aplot to restore the king of Afghanistan.

Throughout this time I was fortunate enough to have close access to Benazir andto army officials, including the head of the military intelligence. There is nodoubt that a large section of the army did all it could to prevent elections takingplace after Zia’s death and then to prevent Benazir winning, often through themost sordid methods. It was with great reluctance (and heavy US pressure), aftermidnight negotiations among go-betweens, that they allowed her to become thefirst woman prime minister of an Islamic nation when she scraped through theelections with the largest number of seats, if without a majority.

But throughout my stay the military were always in control and it was obviouslyonly a matter of time before they stepped back in. Benazir played into theirhands by accepting many of their terms for taking office, then appearing moreinterested in power than in social and economic reform, though she would arguethat the former was needed to effect the latter. Like her father, she was impatientat criticism, and kept hold of the state-controlled news-agency and papersdespite election pledges to free them. Within a month the state government inBaluchistan was dismissed. Her time would be taken up with minute detailssuch as organizing cooks and tableware for official banquets while the largercanvas of problems went ignored. Ministers openly indulged in making money,arguing that they did not expect to be in power long, while her husband’s namebecame involved in a series of scandals. Under pressure from all those whowanted rewards for their eleven-year struggle against Zia, Benazir surroundedherself increasingly with cronies who kept her isolated from public opinion.

One of these was Aitzaz Ahsan, the diminutive and womanizing InteriorMinister who, fearing for his own position, which gave him nominal authority


over the military intelligence, had my visa stopped when I questioned thesuccess of Benazir’s overt efforts to woo the army. The brewing uprising I wroteof in the offending article was suppressed by the army chief, who still had somesympathy for Benazir. But within ten months the government’s failure to tackleescalating ethnic violence in Sindh, and blunders in dealings with the military,allowed the hawks within the armed forces to win the day. On 6 August 1990,while the eyes of the world were on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Pakistan’ssecond elected government was dismissed by the President, citing corruptionand ineptitude and claiming that it had ‘willfully undermined and impaired theworking of the Constitution’. Corruption charges were laid against both Benazirand her husband, who at the time of writing remains in a Karachi jail.

With elections promised and Mr. Jatoi finally Prime Minister if only as caretaker,I was suddenly allowed back to Pakistan in September. Perhaps partly because Icame there from the carefree city of Rio de Janeiro, where I now live, Pakistanthird time round was a sadly depressing place. I found the same conversations,the same generals and the same power-brokers — but more people askingwhether the country should even exist.

Benazir, whom I visited in her new fortress-like house in Karachi, was tearful butunrepentant, refusing to believe she had made any mistakes, though conceding‘You don’t dismiss an elected government to let it back.’ Two weeks earlier thejovial British High Commissioner had been asked to leave her house for subtlysuggesting that perhaps her husband might need taking in hand.

Given Benazir’s record and her formidable array of opponents, the results of the24 October elections were unsurprising. The PPP was trounced, winning onlyforty-five seats out of 217. Benazir naturally cried foul, calling the results ‘anelectoral coup d’état’, but she could not deny that many people were angry,feeling that she, like her father, had cheated them of democracy.

General Zia may be chuckling in his grave, with his protégé Nawaz Sharif nowensconced as Prime Minister and backed by a safe majority and the army andcivil service. But it is an unenviable job. Before the elections a crucial $600 milliona year in US aid was suspended, theoretically because the White House hadsuddenly decided to act on long-held suspicions that Pakistan possesses anuclear bomb. The Gulf crisis doubled the price of oil imports and cut off hardcurrency remittances of hundreds of thousands of expatriate Pakistani workersin the Gulf, the country’s most profitable export Once more Benazir was backlobbying for support in Washington. The curtain may have come down onseveral acts of her story, but the talc may not yet have ended.

Rio de Janeiro, January 1991


I

INVENTING A COUNTRY

There is a moment in the grey half-light of pre-dawn, long after the jackals havestopped screaming and just before the birds start singing, in which time seemsfrozen. Soon the wail of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer will shatter thesilence.— the signal for millions of men to kneel forward, hands placed behindears and facing Mecca, to begin the day’s first call to Allah. Curfew will be liftedand the biggest squatter camp in the biggest town in the world’s only Muslimhomeland will throb with jangling bells, squawking horns, and the babble ofmultifarious sub-continental tongues.

Twelve thousand more people will be born in Pakistan this day. Two thousandwill be dead within a year. More of them will learn to use a gun than to speak thenational language. Medieval sports of cock-fighting and bear-baiting willprovide more of their entertainment than television, and they will have notheatres or concert halls to visit. Only a third will have access to clean drinkingwater and only 15 percent will have sewerage. A quarter will go to school. Manywill become heroin addicts. This is a country killing its future.

As the sun sucks up the dust-cloud breaking the apricot dawn, do not fear toblink. The dream of a British-trained lawyer cum frustrated actor, Pakistan ismore than mere fantasy. A vision brought to fruition by the British departurefrom India, it took just seven years to create yet forty-four years later has reachedno consensus on its meaning. A magical land inhabited by nonsense names likethe Wali of Swat, the Mir of Hunza and the Jam of Lasbela; full of hidden valleyswhere people trade in buttons and shells; mountain passes where a rugby-likeversion of polo is played among the peaks, cows wandering on and off the pitch;deserts where suspected criminals are tried by walking across burning coals;tribal territories where the Kalashnikov is king and no Westerner has ever gone;borderlands where spies of today’s super-powers play out small wars. Many ofits people share neither language nor social system nor tradition but have beengathered together in the name of the crescent in a geographical mass that istangibly real, often frighteningly so.

In Orangi, an illegal settlement of more than a million people on the outskirts ofKarachi, Pakistan’s largest city, curfew and ethnic violence is such a way of lifethat gunfire no longer makes people jump. During times of riot, entering it canseem like passing through the gates of Hell. The influx of guns and drugs from


the Afghan war in an area inhabited by ethnic groups from all across thesubcontinent means killings are so frequent that newspaper reports of massacresare relegated to a lowly inside paragraph, just about where a British localbroadsheet would note a small theft or a fortheoming jumble sale.

After dawn prayers, Orangi life dissipates into streets ringing with thehammering of enough tyres to supply a nation, the chatter of grease-monkeychildren set to work in the more inaccessible parts of engines, the cracked strainsof a haunting Pushtu melody on an ancient transistor. Inside sweatshops, bonyfigures hunch over whining sewing-machines and knock out cloth to export toEast Asia, where it will be printed with designs and sold far more profitably. Asthe heat and dust of the day intensify, inside a few of the more fortunate shacksfans lazily stir the putrid air. They are powered by electricity stolen via anintricate network of bare wires from overhead cables supplying power to the richsouthern suburbs.

Shapeless burqas unidentifiable as women pick their way sparrow-like throughwhere streets crack and denigrate into cloaca. Like silken shuttlecocks theyshuffle hurriedly to bargain for vegetables, unsure when the next outbreak ofrioting will bring back army trucks and curfew. Fleets of impossiblyovercrowded and ludicrously decorated tin buses with skirts of chains plytowards a network of roundabouts, hurtling precariously past derelict estateswhich look like relics of bombing raids. One was the drug bazaar as Sohrab-gothuntil bulldozed by army tanks in December 1986. Another is the ladies-onlymarket where women haggle over cheap glass bangles and musk perfume, andhave intricate henna designs painted on to their hands. Eventually the desert isvisible through the sprawling mass of buildings, and the black-eyed hashish-smoking Pathan drivers sulkily deposit workers at textile and pharmaceuticalfactories to begin their long shifts.

But in those pre-dawn hours before erupting into a maelstrom ofundernourished humanity, Orangi is simmering, ever on the verge of boiling. Itis in this moment in which the day has not quite decided how it will treatmankind that Pakistan is trapped. ‘Islam in danger’ was the cry raised to justifythe necessity of dividing India and inventing a country for Indian Muslims, whofeared they would be swallowed up by the large Hindu majority in a unitedindependent India based on one man, one vote. Today in their very ownhomeland Muslims need safeguarding from each other and must, through half-truths and exaggerated myths of land-hungry Hindu dragons on the borders,maintain their expensive hostility to India to justify their country’s existence.Pakistan’s huge army, entrusted with the task of protecting the country’s‘ideological frontiers’ as well as its borders, has, not surprisingly, often beentempted to indulge in politics. There is further irony. Drawn by religion and


culture to the East and an earlier glory remembered only in the crumblingpalaces of to great Mughal emperors, the country is both resentful of anddependent on American aid to survive. Walls are slashed with slogans againstthe ‘Great Satan’, but the deserts have not yielded the oil of neighbouring Iranthat would enable Pakistan to turn its nose up, as it would dearly love to, at a $4billion US aid package.

Created as a Promised Land for the Muslim religion by a mostly religious eliteled by the British-trained lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s raison d’êtreseems insufficient to hold together a disparate people speaking twenty-twolanguages and, rather than citing, produces only division. The country inheritedthen lost by Benazir Bhutto, only its second nationally elected Prime Ministersince independence has never before been so disunited. Punjab, the biggestprovince, is promoting aggressive Punjabi chauvinism (the result of governmentby a different and hostile party to the centre), Sindh is in a state of armedinsurrection, Baluchistan rejects what it sees as federal government interferencein its territory, while North West Frontier Province runs wild, whole areas offlimits to the government but havens for drugs and arm dealers, and the base forincreasingly disillusioned guerrillas fighting in the continuing war inAfghanistan. After forty-three year of swinging between martial law andunsatisfactory democracy Pakistan’s second democratically elected governmentwas dismissed within twenty months, once more raising uncomfortable questionas to the governability of Pakistan and whether a country based solely onreligion can survive. After her abrupt removal from office in August 1990Benazir Bhutto commented: ‘The real question is can the army come to termswith an elected government?’

The lingering malaise of a country is not a pleasant sight. Born through thehorror of Partition, which saw the biggest and bloodiest migration in history,millions killed and millions uprooted neighbours turning guns and knives oneach other, train door opening to tip mutilated bodies on to platforms as theypassed between India and the newly created Pakistan, its people remain in thewilderness. In the Great Migration of 1947, 15 million people crossed the newborders dividing families and beliefs, their journey often proving fatal. Thebitterness remains in those who remembered as they describe never-endingstraggles of people, some in bullock carts, and others on foot, the old andcrippled on backs, children in baskets often abandoned at the roadside asMuslims fled the lathis of Hindus in the Indian Union and Sikhs and Hindus fledthe muskets of Muslims in the new Pakistan. Many died of cholera or smallpox,and the sorry refugees were preyed upon by marauder often joined by the police,and by the blackest vultures circling overhead following the smell of blood.


The 1947 reality of the poet Mohammad Iqbal’s dream in 1930 of a separateIndian Muslim state was fatally flawed. As late 1933 the idea of Pakistan wasdescribed by Muslim leaders to the Joint Select Committee of the BritishParliament as ‘only a student’s scheme . . . chimerical and unpractical’, referringto an oyster dinner held by Cambridge student Rahmat Ali at London’s ratherun-Islamic Waldorf hotel to propose a country for Muslims. After the 1937elections, had the Hindu-dominated Congress Party agreed, the Muslim Leaguewould still have settled for a share of power in independent India, and before1940 Muslim hardliners were still dismissing the idea of a separate nation forMuslims as absurd.

Even when the Muslim League adopted lqbal’s two-nation theory in the 1940Lahore Resolution, it did not consolidate the Muslim vote in India until 1946 onthe eve of Partition, and then only in the provinces where Muslims were in aminority.2 It was a Muslim party without the support of Muslim masses, run byan elite who cried ‘Islam in danger’ when it was their own positions, never theirreligion, that was at risk. The fact that in 1946 Jinnah indicated to the CabinetCommission Plan3 — a last-ditch attempt by British cabinet ministers to preservethe unity of India — that he would accept a united India providing it containedtwo separate Constitution-making bodies of Hindu and Muslim provinces,suggested that to him at least, Pakistan was really a bargaining position. ThoseMuslims who really wanted Pakistan lived in the parts of India which atPartition remained Indian. Only a fraction of these could flee to Pakistan, leavingmore Muslims in India than in the longed-for homeland.

Pakistan has never quite lived up to the idea. Not surprisingly, it is those whogave up most to make the hazardous cross-border transition into the newcountry who are most frustrated today and most often in the forefront ofKarachi’s ethnic violence. The whole concept was based on the hypocrisy of afew. Why was it necessary to create a country for perhaps the world’s most all-encompassing religion — one surely strong enough to be practised anywhereand which had never been in any danger of being consumed? If religiondetermines borders, why is the Muslim Gulf divided into twelve states? And if itwas so necessary for Muslims to have their own country, how could they justifya Partition which left 40 million Muslims in India?

2 In the 1937 elections the Muslim League won only two out of eighty-six Muslim seats in Punjab, noneout of thirty-five in Sindh, and was crushingly defeated in Bengal and the Frontier — all the areas thatbecame Pakistan.

3 For a full account of the 1946 Cabinet Mission, led by Sir Stafford Cripps, see P. Moon, Divide and Quit,Chatto & Windus, London, 1961, pp. 42-64.


The contradictions arise because the issue was never freedom of religion. As. theIndian scholar M. J. Akbar wrote: ‘Pakistan was not created by the Muslimmasses; it owed its birth to a handful of “leaders” who were not content withseparate beliefs — they wanted separate electorates, separate language, separatedress, separate identities and finally separate homes.’4 Those at the forefront ofmaking the dream happen did not do it for Islam but, like Mohammad Ali Jinnah,who did not exactly follow all the injunctions of Islam, to secure their owneconomic and political ambitions. In fact, were Jinnah alive today, he could beflogged under Pakistan’s strict Islamic laws. A cold nationalist who dislikedconnecting religion and politics and who right up to the mid 1930’s claimed hewas an Indian first and Muslim second, Jinnah saw in the mullahs’ slogans theroute to safeguard both his own future and that of the Muslim landowning elite.

The stranglehold of this unholy alliance continues in Pakistan today, preventingdemocracy taking root and the formation of a middle class. Whether undermartial law or democracy, under Zia or Bhutto, the zamindars have been allowedto loot the country and suffocate development which could weaken their ownposition. As a quid pro quo they tolerate religious laws they themselves ignore,but this means, for example, that every visitor to Pakistan is confronted at theairport with the immortal words, ‘Have you alcohol?’ To appease the mullahsalcohol was banned by the very secular Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who never deniedhis own fondness for whisky. A few years ago some diplomats were expelled fordrinking wine from a teapot in a Chinese restaurant in Islamabad, yet no houseof the upper class or of senior civil servants is complete without a well-stockedbar.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who with Mahatma Gandhi spearheaded the movement forIndian independence, was not wrong when he described the Muslim League as acreation of the elite, concocting a problem which did not exist in the minds of theMuslim masses. The masses were more interested in where the next meal wascoming from. In an article in 1947, Gandhi argued: ‘I hold ii utterly wrong todivide man from man by reason of religion What conflict of interests can there bebetween Hindus and Muslims in the matters of revenue, sanitation, police andjustice? But by then the clergy and zamindars had whipped up Muslin feeling intosuch a frenzy over the idea of Pakistan that it was thought perfectly logical tohave a country made up of two wing 1,500 miles apart, a hostile territory inbetween.

Given its roots, it is not surprising Pakistan has not found it way. But Jinnahnever let contradictions hinder ambition. When he was thirty-nine he had takenas his second wife the sixteen year-old daughter of a Parsi friend, but he

4 M. J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 36.


denounced his own daughter when she wanted to marry a Parsi and left her inIndia. He declared Urdu the national language of the new Pakistan, yet hehimself spoke none. With his first speech as elected President of Pakistan’sConstituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August 1947, Jinnah told the House: ‘Inthe course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to beMuslims, not in a religious sense because that is the personal faith of eachindividual, but in the political sense as the citizens of the nation.’ He was himselfalready contradicting the necessity for Pakistan’s creation. Having got what hewanted through religion, it was, he was saying, to have no further role in politics.

What then was the guiding ideology of Pakistan? Jinnah had used the terms of aliberal democrat, but his use of the title ‘Quaid-e-Azam’ (‘Great Leader’) hisdeclaration of himself as Pakistan’s first Governor-General, concentrating powersin his hands, and his love of pomp, suggest that representative politicalinstitutions may have had little chance of developing. Over the years a myth hasgrown up around Jinnah as a man motivated by Islam, his numerous portraits ingovernment buildings all repainted to show him in Islamic dress rather than theLondon-tailored suits he favored, and fulsome tributes paid to him saying had hesurvived, Pakistan would not have fallen into today’s morass. But, going on hisrecord, this seems unlikely. Unlike Nehru, Jinnah had not fought for socio-economic justice of the people, more for plums for a small coterie. A tellingcomment came from Sheikh Abdullah, the popular leader of the Muslim majoritystate of Kashmir, whose position within India remains hotly contested byPakistan. ‘We have a religion in common with Jinnah but a dream in commonwith Nehru,’ said the man who was to dominate Kashmiri politics for fifty yearsboth in and out of jail.5 But within thirteen months Jinnah had orphaned hiscreation, consumed by the tuberculosis which his ambition could no longer fightoff. He had lived his last days with one lung totally destroyed and the other two-thirds eaten up.

The formation of Pakistan was only the start of the fight. Pakistan had generallytaken over the poorer parts of the subcontinent and was not self-sufficient in anyimportant manufactured products or fuel resource. From scratch a new capitaland government had to be created. Its Foreign Office began life with just onetypewriter. Islam could not provide food and shelter, and men wanted tangiblebenefits. Those who succeeded Jinnah may have been closer to Islam but lackedhis vision and allowed the country to drift into the military rule which haddogged it for more than half its lifetime. The first coup plot was as early as 1951,and by 1958, when the first countrywide martial law was declared, dreams ofdemocracy had evaporated, leaving Pakistanis to watch enviously India’s

5 Tariq Ali, The Nehrus and the Gandhis, Pan Books, 198s, p. 83.


development as a mass democracy despite beginning with the same problems ofregionalism, the lack of a common language and a large influx of refugees.

India’s struggle for independence had been a nationalist one on which its leaderscould build, whereas Pakistan’s had been the demand of a few that many did notwant. Even in Pakistan today its people call themselves Sindhis, Baluch, Pathansfirst, Muslims second and finally Pakistanis. Until that order can be reversed, thecountry has no hope of developing, as no one will put the country’s interestbefore their own — a factor which shows up in every area, from the burgeoninggrowth of the black economy, to the unfair distribution of inputs for agriculture(the main sector of the economy), to refusal to pay income tax, to the suppressionof the peasantry by the ruling zamindars.

Within twenty-five years of its inception Pakistan had not only lost its wayideologically but had split in two, losing more than half its territory — theeastern wing which is now Bangladesh —and putting the last nail in the coffin ofthe two-nation theory. After three wars with India and another looming, twoover Kashmir and the last in 1971 over the secession of East Pakistan, and longperiods of martial law, Benazir Bhutto was faced with the task of putting thedream together again and finding a national identity for Pakistan. Her father,Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister, failed. While he realized that the onlythings which could hold the country together were democracy and gnawregional autonomy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a man of Napoleonic ambition andused these issues to promote his personal power am set in motion operations tocrush the regional nationalities if Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province.President Zia, the most recent in the line of Pakistan’s grinning military dictator,saw the problem too. His solution was to return to the basis for Pakistan’screation and purge the country, spreading orthodox Islam through trying toimpose the identity of the majority Punjabi population on the nation. He failedtoo — one cannot create winter simply by declaring it so when the days are stillwarm and the trees full of leaves — and the minority provinces resented whatthey saw as Punjabi colonization. Even with the generals back in the barracksand the politicians once more in control, the hurdles were immense. The powerof the army and bureaucracy is so entrenched that Benazir Bhutto’s task wasalmost like being given a desk and a phone in the middle of a lawn and told:‘Right, you’re Prime Minister now. Run the country.’

Partition still haunts, but on an ethnic rather than a religious basis. It is carved inthe chest of a twelve-year-old boy, lying dead in a pool of blood, innocent victimof ethnic rivalries that a common religion seems increasingly unable to overcome.He is a mohajir — the name given to Muslim migrants from India, those whogave up most to find themselves isolated in their longed-for homeland andfighting for jobs and survival. The truth rings from Nehru’s words: ‘The alliance


of religion and politics is a most dangerous thing and it yields the most abnormalkind of illegitimate blood.’ Rivalries between Muslim groups in a country ofmany Islams — such rivalry that a Sindhi has taken a knife to the innocentmohajir boy and engraved in his taut young flesh ‘Altaf is a buttsucker’, referringto the leader of the mohajir community. In the space of forty-five years, Pakistanhas gone from a nation searching for a country to a country searching for anation.

Yet the strains of poverty and lack of representative government, a stagnanteconomy and failure to replace the colonial system, have not led people toquestion the country’s basis. While the validity and viability of Pakistan are hotlydebated, rather than doubt Islam they doubt themselves; or, better still, theoutside world, particularly Hindu India or Jewish Israel, the world’s only otherreligious homeland. Unable to create their own national identity in a positivesense, they define themselves negatively by being anti-India, anti-Moscow andeven anti-West, though not within earshot of their US patrons when the nextdelivery of American fighter jets is awaited. The more fragmented the countrybecomes, the more aggressively its people fall back on Islam, seeing all theirproblems as the result of KGB intervention or the work of a mysterious Indo-Zionist lobby.

A country which is unable to organize a lunch, where appointments are neverkept and the capital’s airport will close on mere whims, sees conspiracies behindeverything. A plane cannot simply crash in the mountains, it has to have beenshot down by Indians or hijacked by Afghan secret agents. Even changes in traintimetables are blamed on secret conspiracies. A front-page story in a Pakistaninewspaper in autumn 1988, headed ‘Scandalous Changes to Quetta Train Times’,is typical: ‘The Quetta 171 has been a very popular train with farmers, traders,litigants, and those from all other walks of life. Now, however, thanks to thesinister maneuvering and machinating of the road transporters, the time-tablehas been collusively tampered with.’

The Afghan war and its resultant influx of intelligence agents from all over theworld has increased the paranoia. The CIA ha: one of its biggest stations inIslamabad, admittedly partly for gathering Gulf intelligence through the manyPakistani soldiers provided to that region. In 1988, according to a US StateDepartment report, Pakistan was the world’s second heaviest victim of terroristattacks, with 1,400 deaths or injuries from bomb attacks apparently carried outby agents of the Afghan secret police. In one city, just before the 1988 elections,the lights went off as masked men on motorbikes went on a mass killingcampaign that by dawn had the gutters running in blood. There were manypeople within the country anxious to prevent elections going ahead, somepoliticians had even begged the generals to impost martial law, yet the finger as


ever was pointed outside, this time a Indian agents thought to be interfering inSindh in retaliation to Pakistan’s alleged arming of Sikhs.

There often seems to be no logic in Pakistan. Set down by a military government,its planned capital, Islamabad, has an Orwellian feel with its numbered streetsand houses starting at Zero Point, but in typical Pakistani fashion the numbersjust add to the confusion, rarely following on in the correct order.

A frighteningly widespread religious view argues that the only solution to thecountry’s woes is a return to earlier days when Islam was pure. This meansstopping the learning of English or of modern scientific methods. A direct resultis that in a country of 110 million people there are less than 500 holders of PhDs.Not for lack of talent — in the US alone there are 50,000 foreign-educatedPakistani doctors. The more the country strives for what its religious scholars seeas true Islam, the less equipped it becomes for running a twentieth-century state,and the more it is forced to watch once-lagging competitors such as South Korea,Thailand and Malaysia steam ahead. And the greatest irony of all: Bhutto is amodern, Western-educated young woman, but the country in which she is thedominant political figure almost entirely excludes women from the economy,and were she ever to have to give evidence in a Pakistani court her testimonywould count as only half that of the most uneducated man.6

Many of those responsible for placing such laws on the statute books live just afew miles away from the squatter camp of Orangi, but in a different world andage entirely. Clifton is a place of wedding-cake finery — of wide boulevardslined with marble White House copies with plush silk interiors and gold taps,leather sofas and leopard skin bars. This is the powerhouse of Pakistan where theelite live — the zamindars, the retired generals, the drug barons, the politicians,and, in slightly more modest palaces, the senior bureaucrats. These are thepeople who created the country and make the laws by which the rest must live.The by no means undisputed queen of this insulated life is Benazir Bhutto, aHarvard- and Oxford-educated aristocrat, who rose to power on the votes of arural poor who could not begin to imagine such luxuries but understoodpromises of food, shelter and jobs.

For her part, Bhutto could not have estimated the huge task she had undertakenin bridging this apartheid of wealth. Between the two worlds of Orangi andClifton there is no meeting point. In Orangi the government fears to enter andprovides nothing. Electricity is stolen; buses and schools have to be provided bycommunity groups. In Clifton, wealth, which means that people have their own

6 The Law of Evidence, passed in 1984, means that in many legal situations the evidence of one man isequivalent to that of two women. In murder cases the amount of compensation payable for a murderedwoman is half that for a murdered man.


generators, their own water tanks, and their own security guards, shields themfrom the deficiencies of government. Bhutto, brought up surrounded by a coterieof servants, cannot imagine what it is like to scratch a living from an unforgivingland. Even when in exile during the last period of martial law, she stayed inLondon’s luxurious Barbican Centre, with party faithfuls to do the shopping forher.

After just twenty months in power with no legislation but the budget, Bhuttowas in the dock, charged with corruption and maladministration, left tocontemplate the impossibilities of working a system in which corruption andvested interests are so entrenched. Becoming the world’s youngest PrimeMinister at thirty-five, Bhutto proved unable to take on successfully the powerfultriumvirate of army, bureaucracy, and mullahs, many of whom hold that awoman cannot be ruler of an Islamic state. Despite having won elections, she wasforced to make commitments to these power-brokers, immediately underminingthe legitimacy of her rule.

Policy decisions were constrained by pledges Bhutto had to make to the USbefore she could take power — the very super-power that she believes to beresponsible for the removal, and by implication the death, of her father. Bhuttonever won the trust of the business community, who find even more palm-greasing necessary under an elected government. Her own party,overwhelmingly dominated by zamindars, prevented her introducing either theThatcherite economic policies she so admires or the social reforms she once soenthusiastically advocated on the floor of the Oxford Union.

To understand Pakistan is to go back a few centuries to the days when biglandlords ruled through their grip over the peasants, their ancestral landselectoral rotten boroughs. It is to understand a culture based on a colonial pastwhich bequeathed a centralized system where the bureaucracy is all-powerful,the army is the only force of stability and the Punjabis, the majority ethnic groupwhich dominates both these institutions, are the colonizers of today. Zia,realizing this, tried to create a Pakistani identity based on the Punjab identity,thus alienating the other provinces. He invented a crime — to be anti-Pakistan,which in his terms meant to be anti-Punjab, but with its heritage rooted in Islambecame a convenient stick with which to beat opposition and one which latereven Benazir’s secular government used. For in making sense of Pakistan, it isessential above all to appreciate a religion that is not relegated to the place ofworship but is lived, breathed, walked and even dreamed.

The problem is that no consensus has been reached on what it means to have acountry based on Islam. Too much stress on religion as a common bondprovokes the unsolved argument as to whether Pakistan should be a theocracy


where Islam is used by government to dictate all important social and individualbehavior, and where the benchmark for everything from education to law to themedia is whether it is Islamic, or whether Islam should be kept separate from theworkings of government, simply providing a broad set of guidelines forpolicymakers to refer to. Zia and Benazir Bhutto are the extremes of these views,with Bhutto favoring secular government but forced by fear of the religiouslobby to pander to their wishes. From their crushing defeats in Pakistan’s fewelections it is clear that the religious parties’ ideal is not shared by the majority ofPakistanis, but religion has been a powerful tool for undoing governments.Starting in 1953, with riots against the Ahmadi sect necessitating martial law inLahore, time and again religious slogans have been used to destabilize those inpower.

Islam is a very different thing in the opulent air-conditioned houses wherepoliticians argue points over whisky and soda in cut crystal glasses from what itis in rural villages, where the mullah is often a man to be feared, his battery-powered megaphone the closest thing to modernization. Awareness of thedestructive potential of the religious parties prevented the very twentieth-century Ms. Bhutto from keeping pledges to remove medieval Islamic lawswhich discriminate against women to the extent that if they are raped and go tocourt they are liable to end up in prison themselves, where 43 percent are rapedagain. To prove rape in Pakistan a woman must provide four male witnesses tothe penetration. Many Islamic scholars have argued that this is based on themisreading of an incident in the Arabian desert during one of the Prophet’smilitary campaigns, when his favorite wife Aisha disappeared one night andrejoined the caravan the next morning accompanied by a young soldier. TheProphet’s companions demanded Aisha’s death, but Allah told the Prophet thatshe was innocent and that four witnesses were needed to prove adultery.

In no major religion are word and deed so closely tied as in Islam — the Koran(Holy Book) and Hadis (sayings of the Prophet) are the word of God and thebasis for social law. Salman Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Versescaused an outcry because of its treatment of the Koran, a book on which life aswell as faith is based. Sometimes the meaning is ambiguous and can be twisted.How can women be so repressed by a religion whose holy book states, ‘to everyman what he earns and to every woman what she earns’? The mullah is anextremely powerful figure as interpreter of this, and his word is accepted even if,as often happens, it flies in the fact of progress. A student member of thefundamentalist Jamaat Islami at Lahore University told me earnestly that toomuch education was harmful, a view hard to connect with the glorious Mughalheritage which produced some of the world’s most exquisite art and architecture,such as the Taj Mahal. Most of the time the interests of the mullahs and the Elitecoincide: neither wants power to fall into the hands of the masses, so they keep


them subjugated — the elite because they fear progress will bring threats to theirprivileged positions, the clergy because they see democracy as incompatible withIslam.. President Zia, who spearheaded Pakistan’s most recent Islamicizationcampaign, feared the mullahs’ power so much that he sent spies to villagemosques to find out what they were spreading at Friday prayers.

Dadu, deep in interior Sindh, is such a village, a place where death is a constantpresence. Nights in Dadu are very, very black. The heat presses down and timepasses like a funeral march as the evil white salt creeps across the lands, crackingopen the earth until nothing will grow. Without money or crops there is no wayto bribe the canal supervisor for even a little water.

Life in a Sindhi village is like a penny shove machine in which every fewmoments the weight comes down and pushes more pennies over the edge. It is agame of chance and not skill, and Lala, who started life in the wrong position —as a Dadu sharecropper at the opposite end to the politicians of Clifton — knowshe is about to be pushed over the edge. He has searched hard for the answer andis convinced it is not Islam.

Islam is why they are all there. Lala remembers the stories his father told himwhen he was a child of the immense hope and excitement behind the creation ofPakistan — the Muslim promised land. He wishes he could read the Koran but,like more than three-quarters of the population, he is totally illiterate. Of coursehe knows the formulaic prayers Bismillah Al Rahman Al Rahim (Allah theBeneficial, the Merciful), for which he prostrates himself five times daily, but thetales his father told him of the Prophet’s love and generosity are hard to reconcilewith the blood and thunder with which the mullah regales them in the mosque.Muslim brother is killing Muslim brother in his own village, and young peopletalk only of breaking the country up.

There seem to be so many Islams. At the mosque on Fridays, the mullah rantshysterically against ‘the curse of woman’s rule’ and calls for Islamic governmentand Iranian-style revolution. In the village chaikana (teahouse), through clouds ofhashish smoke, Lala’s younger friends talk enthusiastically of civil war andindependence for their province. Over the ramshackle bazaar, red nationalistflags fly, marked out with menacing black axes. Things are so bad that many talkwith hope of an Indian invasion, wanting to be part of the country their fathersfought to separate from.

The laborer cannot see how either option would solve his immediate problem offeeding a pregnant wife and six children, two of whom have tuberculosis. As hisland turns white from the seeping salt, he is finding it increasingly hard tosurvive on the third of the produce he is allowed to keep. The rest goes to the


feudal lord on whose land he and his ancestors have always worked, whoseshirt-hem he must kiss and for whom he voted in the election. The zamindar wasone of Bhutto’s MPs, who at cocktail parties in his marble palace speaks ferventlyof universal education but would not dream of weakening his own unthinkingpeasant vote bloc by allowing schools in his own fiefdom.

In the one-room shack in which Lala’s family, like most of the villagers, lives, ispinned a picture of Benazir Bhutto. Lala still believes she is their only chance. Heonce heard her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister,speak, and Lala had never been given such hope. Bhutto’s words, ‘roti, kapra ourmakan’ (bread, clothing and shelter), seemed directed straight at him. Bhutto didnot keep his promises but instead took into his government the very landlordswho were oppressing Lala and his ilk. ‘When he was toppled in a coup we madelittle protest. Army rule again.’

Lala says they felt guilty later, when Bhutto was hanged by his army chief whoousted him, General Zia ul-Haq. ‘Bhutto was Sindhi and Sindhis have alwaysbeen oppressed by the majority Punjabi population, who fill the army, civilservice and police. Some of us tried to make amends in 1983 when we joined themovement to protest against martial law but as usual the rest of the country didnot support Sindh. The army came in tanks then. They stole cattle and rapedwomen and shot those demanding their rights. They rounded up thousands.’

Lala fled to the forest and became a bandit. Some of his friends stayed there.They got guns — plenty were available from the Afghan war — and startedkidnapping people and demanding protection money. They made a lot of money,Lala knew, but what kind of a life for a man, living like pigs in the dirt, in theforest, always on the run?’ So he went back to the land, although he recalls that‘one year was particularly bad. There was no rain so we did not even havesubsoil in which to grow crops. We had a goat but had to sell it to keep alive.’

Lala thought of going to the city: ‘People used to say the streets of Karachi werepaved with gold.’ He also heard that they were killing Sindhis. ‘But there wasalways hope — Zia could not last for ever and one day the army would go backto barracks.’ In the meantime they would continue to pray.

Zia’s plane fell out of the sky one day in August 1988. Lala was in the field, hisface, running with sweat, looking far beyond his thirty years as he tried to coaxcrops from the parched land. He heard shouts and some friends came running.They were so excited they could hardly get the words out. ‘Zia is dead! Zia isdead! Now everything will change.’ Lala was skeptical. He thought the armywould take over, but as they all crowded round Ghulam’s cheap cracklingtransistor they heard there were to be elections.


That autumn was incredible. ‘Every day brought new hopes. Benazir had hadher baby early, tricking the generals who had thought she would be unfit tocampaign. Benazir would be allowed to contest elections.’ Politicians appeared ingreat noisy cavalcades, promising the moon and stars. Lala went to meetings andbrought back lumps of goat-meat for his family, a welcome change from theirusual diet of rice and nan (unleavened bread). ‘Jeay Bhutto [long live Bhutto], jeayBenazir,’ he roared, until his lungs burned. No sub continental politician couldstir emotions like she did. On voting day Sindh repaid its indifference to Mr.Bhutto’s death with a massive majority for his daughter.

When they heard she was to be Prime Minister they danced till dawn. ‘Danced!In the face of the mullah! Benazir would let us dance.’ There would be jobs andfood, and perhaps Lala’s oldest son could even go to school. Already Benazir hadreleased all political prisoners and freed trade unions. But hope fades quickly,and soon Lala had no more rice to feed his family and was thinking of rejoininghis friends in the forest. ‘Prices have gone up, more than doubled. There are nojobs.’ Recently the old shoe-keeper at the nearby Sufi shrine had died. He used tomake only a few rupees a day but people fought for the tender, which eventuallywent for 500 rupees.

Lala wished he had the means to go to Islamabad, to the specially createdPlacement Bureau through which all state jobs were controlled, but someone toldhim that you only got jobs if you could prove you had been in prison duringZia’s rule. A Karachi jailer was offering fake prison certificates and prisonnumbers stamped on arms for 500 rupees, or you could get photos of yourselfpretending to be whipped (apparently guaranteeing a grade 17 position in thecivil service) for 2,000 rupees, but Lala had nothing. Then someone told him theBureau had been disbanded anyway —corruption again.

‘Some foreigners came and said they would build a school but the landlordlaughed when we asked him. There were rumors of a clinic but it did not come.Electricity and water? Well, every politician promises those — we don’t fall forthat one. But we did hope for a road this time. People who went to Karachi areback. They say there are no jobs there — just curfew and killing.’

Jinnah’s dream of democratic Pakistan died in 1958 with the first army rule.Whether politicians or grinning generals are on top, it is still the same coterie ofelite ruling the country with no interest in the masses while the mullahs whohave been trounced in Pakistan’s three elections continue to exert control.Governments and generals alike are frightened to lay themselves open to thecharge of being un-Islamic, thus undermining the whole existence of the country.Lala’s wife wants to tear down the yellowing picture of Benazir, but to Lala that


would be the end of all hope. He would rather die first. And so life goes on inmost Pakistani villages, doing time in the struggle against ever-shrinkingresources, and waiting for Allah.


2

‘GANGSTERS IN BANGLES’

COME TO ISLAMABAD

BENAZIR BHUTTO’S INHERITANCE

Only a few months earlier it would have been an unthinkable scene. On one sidesat the generals, stiff-backed and unsmiling, about to hand over the power theyhad enjoyed for more than half Pakistan’s existence. On the other, close friendsand relations of Benazir Bhutto and leading members of her People’s Partychatted and laughed. Young and brightly dressed, best hound’s-tooth jackets,double-breasted blazers and wide tics out for the occasion, silk handkerchiefs inpockets, they were a different generation entirely to the poker-faced bureaucratsin grey traditional shalwar kamiz who lined the back rows. Roped off at one end,the Pakistani press corps was buzzing with excitement. Many of them hadsuffered lashes under Zia’s martial law, and until recently censorship had meantthat the name of Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister and founder of the PPP,Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, could not be mentioned. Today his daughter was beingsworn in as Prime Minister.

In the front ‘row Benazir’s Iranian-born mother, Nusrat, dabbed her eyes,overcome by the occasion. Opposite, General Hamid Gul, the militaryintelligence chief, looked on disapprovingly. For eleven and a half years he andthe men in khaki had seen these people as enemies of the state. They hadpersecuted them, arrested them, tortured them, tapped their phones. In theelections two weeks earlier, Gul had masterminded the strategy of the oppositionIslamic Democratic Alliance (IDA), whose propaganda denounced the Bhuttoladies as ‘gangsters in bangles’. But to no avail. The will of the people hadprevailed, and Pakistan’s powerbase was gathered together to witness aswearing-in ceremony which would put Benazir theoretically in charge of Guland his cohorts.

It was a perfect December day. Sunlight fragmented on the huge goldenchandeliers of the Aiwan-e-Sadr, Pakistan’s excessively ornate presidentialpalace, nestling at the foot of the lush emerald Margalla Hills. Outside, work had


resumed on the Prime Minister House next door, which people had long ceasedhoping would ever be occupied by a fairly elected premier.

Just after three o’clock muttering began. Benazir was coming. The large golddoors opened, and along a red carpet the Presidential guard in starched whiteshalwar kamiz with gold pagris escorted the Islamic world’s first female PrimeMinister, accompanied by Ghulam Ishag Khan, the dour dome-headedbureaucrat who had become President on Zia’s death. Prayers were said, andthen Bhutto, dressed in green silk and white dupatta, the colours of Islam,repeated the oath on the Constitution that her father had brought in and that Ziahad later tailored to increase Presidential power. Still uneasy in Eastern dress, thewoman who had once bought all her clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue adjustedher dupatta, pleasing the photographers, and stumbled on the words of the oathof office, which she later claimed had been deliberately read out a different wayto trip her up. But as she signed her name she could barely restrain the smileamid supporters’ cries of ‘Long live Bhutto’.

It was a day of victory, marking the conclusion of eleven years of struggle. ‘In theend good always triumphs over evil,’7 said Benazir after the ceremony, recallingthat at her last meeting with her father in his prison cell she had promised tocontinue the fight for democracy. At only twenty-six, she was imprisoned whenher father was hanged in 1979 and was refused permission even to see the body.The five years she then spent in jail and detention was a far cry from the life shehad enjoyed as a student at Oxford, driving a yellow MG littered with parkingtickets and flitting between debates and Pimms parties. In 1984 ill-healtheventually persuaded the military regime to allow her to live in exile in Londonbefore returning to Pakistan in 1986 to be greeted by a crowd of more than amillion people packing the streets of Lahore.

On 2 December 1988 Benazir Bhutto became the world’s youngest premier, butwhile her supporters let off fireworks and danced in the streets, she claimed shewas not excited by the prospect. ‘The idea of being Prime Minister has never heldany glamour for me. What really excites me is the idea of fulfilling the dreams ofthe PPP and the people.’8

For her mother, who had campaigned alongside Benazir after a fight against lungcancer, the loss of her husband and of her son, Benazir’s younger brotherShahnawaz, in a mysterious poisoning, it was all too emotional. Eyes glistening,she confessed, ‘She looked so young and vulnerable standing there. It’s beautiful,

7 Conversation with author, Aiwan-e-Sadr, Islamabad, 2 December 1988.

8 ibid.


but I wish it could have happened without so much sadness and the deaths ofmy husband and son.’9

The unreality intensified after the ceremony when the band outside on thebalcony struck up ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and the guests crowded not round thenew young Prime Minister but round General Aslam Beg, the apparently benignarmy chief whom everyone wanted to congratulate for overseeing Pakistan’s firstpeaceful transition of power. It was impossible to scrutinize the expressionbehind the dark glasses of the man whom many suspected was involved in theplane crash which had killed Zia and wiped out the senior ranks of the army,leaving the scarcely known Beg in charge. Why had he decided to travel in aseparate helicopter, and why had he flown straight over the wreckage instead ofturning back to see if there were any survivors? These were the questions onmany lips.

The tall, cold-eyed American ambassador stood aloof in the mirrored and wood-paneled room, carefully watching proceedings in which he had had a notunsubtle hand. Already starting to acquire his nickname of Viceroy of Pakistan, itwas only when Ambassador Robert Oakley had called on Benazir for tea that thepublic really believed that she might become Prime Minister. Later he was toadmit that he had deliberately blocked an FBI inquiry into the mysterious crashwhich had also killed his predecessor. Could Bhutto trust the superpower whoseaid was so essential but whom she believed to be behind the removal, and by,implication the death, of her father? She still felt a chill when she rememberedHenry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, warning her father it 1976 that if hedid not drop his nuclear ambitions he would be ‘made a horrible example of’.10

Benazir was well aware that she did not have the majority political support herfather had enjoyed to enable her to go against the wishes of both superpowers.But she had had a hard time stopping her supporters burning US flags in theelection run-up.

Bhutto, sipping sweet tea and nibbling gaudy sweetmeats, looked momentarilybemused. Suddenly she was in control of those who had for eleven and a halfyears seen her as enemy number one. Intelligence agents devoted to monitoringher movements, who had tortured and rounded up her supporters, were nowpledged to protect her. A thousand and one questions went through her mind.Five of the nine corps commanders were thought to be Zia supporters — wouldthey let her govern?

9 Conversation with author, 2 December 1988.

10 Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East, Hamish Hamilton, London, p. 86.


More worryingly, General Hamid GuI had been behind the propagandacampaign of the right-wing opposition, creating’ the IDA which, in an attempt todenounce her Western background, air-dropped leaflets showing her dancing ina Paris nightclub and her mother clad in sequined Western evening dresswaltzing with President Ford as evidence of their ‘anti-Islamic’ behavior.Newspaper advertisements claimed she would ship babies to Paris and letAmericans into Pakistan’s controversial nuclear plant. In a rare break in herhectic election campaig

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